‘So?’
‘It’s still waiting to happen. Life and death, Carole, things they’ve never heard about in Waikiki.’
‘They’ve heard about life and I’ll stick with that any day. It’s your lady friend Dr Rafferty I’m not sure about.’ Neil let this pass. ‘She wants to save the albatross. Is there something wrong with that?’
‘Maybe there is, Neil. Yes, I think there is…
***
When Nurse Crawford had gone Neil returned to the protest cally. Dr Barbara had stepped to the podium, where she received a standing ovation from the action committee - a retired astronaut, two over-earnest academics, a public-spirited car ealer and three wives of local businessmen. In phrases that Neil ad learned to lip-read off the silent screen she saluted the. udents for their support and cash donations. Her blonde hair bated freely about the well-tailored shoulders of her safari suit, but her modest smile was firmly in place as her level blue eyes, steadied by some internal gyroscope, assessed the size of the audience and the likely take of dollar bills.
‘Save the phoenix…’ Neil murmured. The rally, for all the balloons and applause, had attracted fewer people than Dr Barbara’s previous jamborees.
Indignation, even the fierce variety patented by Dr Barbara, had a short shelf life. The albatross was her trademark, that long-winged, ocean-soaring, guilt-bringing bird. But practical results, of the kind achieved by Greenpeace, Amnesty International and the Live Aid concerts of the 198os, had eluded Dr Barbara. The French government still denied that nuclear testing would resume at Saint-Esprit.
For all the footage of graffiti-scrawled camera-towers that Kimo had supplied to the TV networks, an anti-nuclear campaign could no longer bring in the crowds. Too many of the people at Dr Barbara’s rallies were tourists, elderly Japanese couples and family groups from Sydney or Vancouver, for whom an ecological protest meeting was an established part of the holiday street scene, along with the fire breathers, pickpockets and nightclub touts. Dr Barbara was a minor media phenomenon, appearing with her bird-atrocity footage on chat shows and wild-life programmes. She attracted a troupe of dedicated admirers, but failed to enlist the support of the established animal rights groups.
Nonetheless, she was as undeterred as ever, and addressed the rally with all her old fervour. The salt-water ulcers had healed, along with the eye infection that she refused to allow the French doctors to treat with their antibiotics (‘tested on animals and third-world volunteers!’). She had put on weight, thanks to a regime of fund-raising dinners, and the micro-climate of TV studios had left her face attractively pale.
Neil remembered how she had cradled him in her arms as he was carried from the plane at Honolulu Airport - so different from the aggressive stance she had taken as he lay bleeding on the runway at Saint-Esprit, when she faced the pistol-waving French sergeant with the triumphant gaze of a huntress guarding her prey.
Despite all her efforts, however, her audiences were declining.
‘Doctor, you’ll have to shoot me in the other foot..
Neil massaged his aching calf, thinking of the bedraggled and eccentric woman he had first seen five months earlier outside a Waikiki hotel, shouting abuse at the doormen exasperated by her high-pitched English voice and the banner she waved in the faces of the guests.
Neil was leaving the hotel after a farewell dinner with his mother and step-father. Having completed his tour of duty in Hawaii, Colonel Stamford was being reassigned to a base in Georgia. Neil’s widowed mother had met the colonel soon after her husband’s death, while she worked as the catering officer at a U. S.
officers’ club in London. Neil liked the amiable Californian, who was forever urging him to enlist in the Marine Corps and find a new compass-bearing in his life, and accepted the colonel’s suggestion that he join them in Honolulu.
Neil was still unsettled by the suicide of his father, a radiolo gist who had diagnosed his own lung cancer and decided to end his life while he could breathe without pain. But suicide was a suggestive act, as a tactless counsellor at the hospital had told Mrs Dempsey, often passing from father to son like a dangerous gene. Trying to distance himself from his memories of his father, Neil gave up any hopes of studying medicine. The vacuum in his life he filled with body-building, judo and long-distance swim ming, lapping hundreds of lengths each week at his London pool. He swam the Thames, despite the efforts of the River Police to stop him, from Chelsea Bridge to the first lock at Teddington. Above all, he revelled in long night-swims, when he moved in a deep dream of exhaustion and dark water.
The powerful physique of this moody sixteen-year-old, and his plans to swim the English Channel at night, together appealed to Colonel Stamford, who talked to Neil of the great seas around Hawaii. Once he arrived, the Waikiki beach world swallowed him whole. He missed his girl-friend Louise, a highly strung but affectionate music student, and sent her video-cassettes of himself surfing near Diamond Head. Bored with his class work, he dropped out of high school and crewed on yachts, worked as a pool attendant and then found a part-timejob as a projectionist at the university film school. During his spare time he prepared for the challenge he had set himself, the thirty-mile swim across the Kaiwi Channel from Makapuu Head to the neighbouring island of Molokai.
When his mother and Colonel Stamford told him of their imminent move to Georgia, Neil asked if he could remain in Honolulu for the summer. To his surprise, his mother agreed, but Neil was aware that in her vague way she had begun to reject him.
An anxious and easily tired woman, she saw in his square shoulders and boxer’s jaw an upsetting reminder of her dead husband. She and the colonel settled Neil into a student rooming house near the university, and celebrated their departure with a last dinner in Waikiki. Afterwards Neil kissed his mother’s over rouged cheek and accepted his step-father’s kindly bear-hug. He then walked through the lobby doors and straight into the quixotic and testing world of Dr Barbara Rafferty.
When he first arrived for dinner he had noticed the shabby, middle-aged woman in a threadbare cotton dress. She crouched between two limousines in the car park, unwrapping a paper parcel, and Neil assumed that she was a beggar or down-and-out, hoping to cadge a few dollars from the delegates to a maritime safety convention.
Two hours later, when he left, she was still there, hovering around the ornamental fountain that faced the entrance. Seeing Neil emerge from the hotel, she waved a makeshift banner and shouted in a strong English voice: ‘Save the albatross! Stop oil pollution now!’ Before she could confront Neil the doormen bundled her away.
Handling her roughly, they propelled her into the drive beyond the hotel gates and flung the banner onto the ground. She knelt beside it, skirt around her white thighs, a hand to her bruised chin.
Drawn by her English accent, Neil helped the woman to her feet. She accepted his handkerchief and wiped her tears, flowing from indignation rather than grief.
‘Are you one of the delegates?’ She frowned at his youthful face. ‘If they’re sending their midshipmen they really must have something to hide.’
‘I’m not a delegate. ‘ Neil tried to calm her trembling shoulders, but she
pushed him away. ‘I’ve been saying goodbye to my mother and step-father. He’s a colonel in the U. S. Army.’
‘The American Army? One of the world’s greatest envi ronmental threats.’ She brushed the dirt from her hands. ‘No use saying goodbye, they said goodbye to us a long time ago.
Listen, do you have a car?’
‘I came by bus,’ Neil lied. The army-surplus jeep he had bought to please his step-father was parked a hundred yards along the beach, but Neil decided to distance himself from this unstable Englishwoman. As he folded the banner he noticed the slogan hand-painted in red ink. “Save the Albatross”,’ he repe ated.
‘Do they need saving?’
‘They certainly do. Still, I’m glad you’ve heard of the albatross.’
‘Everyone has.’ Neil gestured to the evening sky ov
er Diamond Head and its corona of soaring birds. ‘They’re just a common sea-bird.’
‘They’ll soon be a lot less common. The French are killing them at Saint-Esprit, poisoning them by the thousand.’
‘That’s a shame…’ Neil tried to seem sympathetic. ‘But it’s a nuclear test island.’
‘You’ve heard of that, too? I’m impressed. ‘ A tourist party emerged from the hotel and waited by the limousines, but a dispute between the drivers and the courier left them standing in an uneasy huddle. Seeing her chance, the Englishwoman unwrapped her banner. In an effort to make herself presentable, she brushed the blonde hair from her high forehead and relaxed the muscles of her face, imposing a fierce smile on its warring planes. She pulled a bundle of leaflets from her bag and pressed them into Neil’s hands. ‘Start giving those out. You can tell the doorman you’re a guest at the hotel. ‘ look… it’s too bad about the albatross, but I have to go.’ Neil was aware that at any moment his mother and the colonel might leave the hotel and be surprised to find him involved in this curious demonstration. Hiding his face behind the leaflets, he noticed that the Save the Albatross Fund invited contributions to the treasurer and secretary, Barbara Rafferty, at a children’s home in a poorer district of Honolulu.
‘Come on, don’t look so shy.’ The woman seemed amused by Neil. ‘Help me hold the banner - you don’t have to think everything out first. And why are you so muscular? Steroids aren’t good for the testicles. In a few years you won’t be any use to your girl-friends.’
‘I don’t need steroids…’ Neil released the banner, which blew against the woman, wrapping the red-lettered strip around her like a bandage. ‘Good luck, Mrs Rafferty.’
‘Dr Rafferty. You can call me Dr Barbara. Now, stand there and shout with me.
Save the… albatross!’ Neil left her shouting at the bored tourists as they rolled away in their limousines towards the Waikiki nightclubs. Ecological movements had always failed to stir him, though he sympathized with activists who were trying to save the whale or protect the beaches where rare species of turtle laid their eggs after immense oceanic journeys. The whales and turtles were swimmers like himself.
But the obsessive do-goodery of so many animal rights groups had a pious and intolerant strain. It was necessary to test drugs, like the antibiotic that cured the rare strain of pneumonia he contracted after swimming the Severn. His mother and Louise would go on using lipstick and mascara; to spare them from cancer of the lip or eye a few rabbits might usefully die in the laboratory rather than the cooking pot.
But something about the lonely campaign of this English doctor had touched him. The departure of his mother and the arrival of Dr Rafferty in some way seemed connected. Neil knew that he was drawn to older women, like the manager of the rooming house and a middle-aged lecturer in film studies, both of whom had noticed Neil and begun to flirt with him. As he waved goodbye to his mother and Colonel Stamford at the airport, he found himself thinking of Dr Rafferty.
A week later, in downtown Honolulu, he saw the blood-red banner tied to the railings of the Federal Post Office building. A small crowd had gathered, waiting as two policemen cut through the cords. Dr Rafferty stood nearby, chanting her
slogans like a scarecrow wired for sound. She was hoping to be arrested, and was more concerned to provoke the bored policemen than convert the passers-by to her cause. An elderly man in a black suit and tie, like a kindly usher at a funeral parlour, tried to speak to her, but she waved him away, watching the traffic for any sign of a news reporter with a camera. The policemen confiscated the banner, and one of them struck her shoulder with his open hand, almost knocking her to the ground. Without complaint she turned and walked past Neil, losing herself among the lunchtime pedestrians.
Despite this set-back, she kept up her one-woman campaign.
Neil saw her haranguing the surfers on Waikiki beach, handing out leaflets to the tourists in the Union Street Mall, buttonholing a group of clergymen attending a conference at the lolani Palace.
Often she was tired and dispirited, carrying her banner and leaflets in a faded satchel, the bag lady of the animal rights movement.
Neil was concerned for her, in exactly the same way he had worried over his mother in the months after his father’s death.
She too had neglected herself, endlessly fretting about Neil and the unnamed threats to his well-being until he felt like an endangered species. Remembering those fraught days, he sympathized with the albatross, wings weighed down by all the slogans and moral blackmail.
To his surprise, he found that there was an element of truth in her campaign.
A paragraph in a Honolulu newspaper reported that the French authorities on Tahiti had withdrawn their approval for the re-occupation of Saint-Esprit by the original inhabitants. Army engineers were extending the runway, and it was rumoured that the government in Paris might end its moratorium on nuclear testing.
Neil secretly admired the French for their determination to maintain a nuclear arsenal, just as he admired the great physicists who had worked on the wartime Manhattan Project. As a young air force radiologist in the I9—os, Neil’s father had attended the British nuclear trials held at the Maralinga test site in Australia, and his widow now claimed that her husband’s cancer could be traced back to these poorly monitored atomic explosions. She often stared at Neil as if wondering whether his father’s irradiated genes had helped to produce this self-contained and wayward youth. Once, Neil rode out on a borrowed motorcycle to the cruise missile base at Greenham Common, moved by the memory of the nuclear weapons in their silos and by the few women protesters still camping against the wire.
Without success, he tried to ingratiate himself with the women, explaining that he too might be a nuclear victim.
The power of the atomic test explosions, portents of a now forgotten apocalypse, had played an important part in drawing him to the Pacific. As he screened cold-war newsreels for the modern-history classes in the film school theatre he stared in awe at the vast detonations over the Eniwetok and Bikini lagoons, sacred sites of the twentieth-century imagination. But he could never admit this to anyone, and even felt vaguely guilty, as if his fascination with nuclear weapons and electro-magnetic death had retrospectively caused his father’s cancer.
What would Dr Rafferty say to all this? One afternoon in Waikiki he was buying an underwater watch in a specialist store when he saw her unpacking her banner and leaflets. Neil followed her as she wandered past the bars and restaurants, shaking her head in a dispirited way. She stopped at an open-air cafeteria and stared at the menu, running a cracked finger-nail down the price list. Suppressing his embarrassment, Neil approached her.
‘Dr Barbara? Can I get you a sandwich? You must be tired.’
‘I am tired.’ She seemed to remember Neil and his artless manner, and allowed him to take the satchel. ‘Look at this place buy, buy, buy and no-one gives a hoot that the real world is disappearing under their feet. I’ve seen you somewhere. I know, steroids - you’re the body-builder. Well, you can help rebuild my body. Let’s see if they serve anything that isn’t packed with hormones.’ They sat at a table by the entrance, Dr Barbara handing her leaflets to the passing customers. She ordered
a tomato and lettuce sandwich, after an argument with the waitress over the origins of the mayonnaise.
‘Avoid meat products,’ she told Neil, still unsure what she was doing in the company of this British youth. ‘They’re crammed with hormones and antibiotics.
Already you can see that men in the west are becoming feminized - large breasts, fatter hips, smaller scrotums..
Neil was glad to let her talk, and watched the sandwich disappear between her strong teeth. For reasons he had yet to understand, he enjoyed seeing her eat. Her clear gums and vivid tongue, the muscles in her throat, all fascinated him. At close quarters Dr Barbara was far less dejected than the woman he saw arguing with the police and tourists. Her strong will overrode the shabby cotton dress and untend
ed hair.
She sat back and polished her teeth with a vigorous forefinger.
‘1 needed that - you’ve done your bit today for the albatross.’ She noticed Neil glancing proudly at his rubber-mounted under water watch. ‘What is it? One of those sadistic computer games?’
‘It’s a deep-water chronometer. I’m planning to swim the Kaiwi Channel to Molokai.’
‘Swim? It’s rather a long way. Why not take the plane?’
‘That isn’t a challenge.
Long-distance swimming is… what I do.’ Trying to amuse her, he added:
‘Think of it as my albatross.’
‘Really? What are you trying to save?’
‘Nothing. It’s hard to describe, like swimming a river at night.’
Exaggerating for effect, he said: ‘I swam the Thames from Tower Bridge to Teddington.’
‘Is that allowed?’
‘No. The river police had their spotlights on. I could see the beams through the water..
‘Long-distance swimming - all those endorphins flowing for hours. Though you don’t look under stress.’ Dr Barbara pushed a’de her leaflets, intrigued by this amiable but obstinate youth who had come to her aid.
‘Perhaps you’re a true fanatic.
Physically very strong, but mentally…? When did all this start?’
‘Two years ago, after my father died. He was a doctor, too. I needed to stop thinking for a while.’
‘Good advice. I wish more people would take it. What about your mother?’
‘She’s fine, most days. She married an American colonel. He’s kind to her.
They’ve just gone back to Atlanta.’
‘So you’re alone here in Honolulu, planning to swim the Kaiwi Channel. Do they know about it?’
‘Of course. They don’t think I’m serious. It’s too far, even with a pace-boat. But that’s not the point.’
‘What is?’ Dr Barbara leaned forward, trying to see through the hair over Neil’s eyes. ‘Or don’t you know?’ Neil covered the dial of his chronometer, as if keeping a secret sea-time to himself. ‘People think you’re alone on long-distance swims. But after five miles you’re not alone any more. The sea runs right into your mind and starts dreaming inside your head.
Rushing to Paradise Page 3